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Boots Riley: A Marxist with a Sense of Humor and a Great New Film, "Sorry to Bother You"
Boots Riley, From the New York Times
Riley connects with others easily, on the street and in his art — he has been writing rhymes about radical politics long enough to know how to frame ideas in punchy, compelling language. It’s a skill at the intersection of activism and art-making, which is where he sits. In high school, when he still went by his given name, Ray, he acted in student plays and danced at talent shows. (During a senior trip, where he wore a pair of brown Florsheim boots, his schoolmates gave him his nickname.) He also joined the Progressive Labor Party, at 15, and worked to unionize California farmworkers, linking up with “Mexican dudes who came to the Central Valley with the purpose of fomenting revolution, doing work in the fields — the literal fields. They had a vision that wasn’t new, but it was new to me, about how you could create a mass radical movement step by step.”
His conviction, forged in the P.L.P., is that as long as politicians are beholden to big-money “puppeteers,” the best strategy for change is to bypass the puppets and directly threaten the string-pullers’ economic interests, through work stoppages — the one radical act, perhaps, that entrenched power can’t co-opt. “It affected me because it wasn’t this vague notion of ‘change the world,’?” he said of his time among the farmworkers. “It was, ‘Here’s a way things can happen.’?” After that he became an advocate for Palestinian rights and a prominent member of the Occupy movement, helping Oakland residents to protest home foreclosures. In the wake of the Ferguson protests and amid the rise of Black Lives Matter, Riley, in an interview with “Democracy Now!” disputed the notion that “all you need to do is get your voice in the streets and things will change,” describing mere attempts to “shame power into action” as ineffectual. Rather, he argued that demonstrators should “combine social movements with the ability to withhold our labor” in order to “give social movements teeth.”
His conviction, forged in the P.L.P., is that as long as politicians are beholden to big-money “puppeteers,” the best strategy for change is to bypass the puppets and directly threaten the string-pullers’ economic interests, through work stoppages — the one radical act, perhaps, that entrenched power can’t co-opt. “It affected me because it wasn’t this vague notion of ‘change the world,’?” he said of his time among the farmworkers. “It was, ‘Here’s a way things can happen.’?” After that he became an advocate for Palestinian rights and a prominent member of the Occupy movement, helping Oakland residents to protest home foreclosures. In the wake of the Ferguson protests and amid the rise of Black Lives Matter, Riley, in an interview with “Democracy Now!” disputed the notion that “all you need to do is get your voice in the streets and things will change,” describing mere attempts to “shame power into action” as ineffectual. Rather, he argued that demonstrators should “combine social movements with the ability to withhold our labor” in order to “give social movements teeth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/magazine/how-boots-riley-infiltrated-hollywood.html
"Sorry to Bother You" From the New York Times
But Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
This film is laugh out loud funny and WTF funny and jaw dropping funny and scary funny--which is hard to do when you are dealing with class struggle in America and the way that corporate bosses pit racial and ethnic groups against each other to divide and conquer workers. This film is not like any other American film you have ever seen. Europe, of course, has "Sweet Movie" and others which have raised the What the Fuck bar so high that no American film will ever top them--though here is hoping that American film makers try.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/movies/sorry-to-bother-you-review-lakeith-stanfield.html
For any who are not convinced that the struggle for racial justice is the same as the struggle for economic justice I have two questions:
1) Which Americans were the only Americans willing to defend the Scottsboro Boys (Black teenagers accused of raping white women in Alabama in 1931). Answer, the American Communist Party
2) What group was Reverend King in Memphis to support when he was gunned down? Answer, striking Black sanitation workers.
And now, some music from The Coup
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